As much an environmentalist as a brilliant photographer specializing in aerial images, Robert Haas gives us one of his most magnificent portraits of Earth in this album of views from the Arctic Circle. Nor is it a bleached landscape of snow and shadow; this oversized book yields dramatic 22 x 14-inch images of vivid color and surprising diversity, taken over a three-year period across Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Haas captures the arctic landforms, the iconic wildlife, and the footprint of man in images of humpback whales in Disko Bay, fingers of ice across the Hudson Bay in Manitoba, the skeletal spine of a long-ago shipwreck in Tranvik, and swirling abstract of snowmobile tracks in Kiruna.

"Aerial photographer Haas continues his magnificent Through the Eyes series, following volumes on Africa and Latin America with an on-the-wing tour of the Arctic Circle.... While humans are rarely in evidence in these dramatic aerial views, the fact is we are everywhere in this seemingly pristine realm in the insidious form of pollution and the rapidly increasing effects of global warming. That concern aside, Haas' exquisitely patterned panoramas invite awed contemplation. The stunning variety of landscapes is a surprise, the grand spectrum of turquoises, whites, and earth tones an astonishment. Haas' gaze reaches whales beneath the sea, and caribou, polar bears, Dall sheep, and Icelandic horses, on vast vistas of ice, peatland, and mountains. Haas invites us to contemplate the Arctic's forbidding yet endangered glory in the belief that the battle between those who would exploit it and those who would protect this wilderness will 'test the contours of the human spirit itself'."—Booklist